Pinball enthusiasts swoon for game's siren song

Aaron Klygo's pockets are filled with the usual items - keys, wallet and the occasional scrap of paper. But for years, those items were joined by something unexpected - an 80-gram carbon steel sphere.

“I love it so much,” he says of the polished metal ball. “Some days it can be your worst enemy, but most days it loves me.”

For countless hours, Klygo has buffeted that ball off bumpers, targets and kickers, hopelessly lost in the siren song of the pinball machine's pings and clicks. But when he moved from New York to Ainsworth at the end of 2011, Klygo missed the camaraderie of like-minded pinheads.

“After I moved to Iowa I just thought, where do I go?” he says. “Who do I need to talk to? I wanted to go to my buddies' places to play pinball like I used to, and there was no outlet for that.”

So Klygo took action.

Early in 2012 he launched the Iowa Pinball Club - a free web-based community for pinball enthusiasts throughout Iowa. In six months, the group has grown to include more than 40 members.

Meet the members

Some - like Tony Brewer of Cedar Rapids - joined with the sole purpose of purchasing a specific machine.

“Personally, I really wanted an old Playboy pinball machine, 'cause it's just awesome,” he says of the vintage machine nestled in the corner of his neon-lit game room.

Rachel Braunigan - one of the club's two female members - signed on with the hope of reliving memories, while simultaneously making new ones for her four boys.

“My husband - we have been married for 10 years - we played this when we were first together,” she says of the Revenge from Mars pinball machine she purchased via connections made in the club.

The game now sits in her Cedar Falls home. With three of her four boys under the age of 7, Braunigan said she hopes pinball can be a part of their childhood as well.

“I remember being 6 or 7 and my mom would pick up dinner at a local burger joint. I would beg and beg for a coin to go play the machine in the back,” she says.

But her boys have not had similar experiences.

When Revenge from Mars arrived and Braunigan was unpacking it, she said her 6-year-old son's reaction saddened her.

“He said, ‘Pinball. What is that?'” she says. “Because I was never able to take him anywhere to play.”

The lack of publicly available pinball games is something club member Jeremy Park is trying to change with his own business. Pinball machines line the lobby walls of his computer repair business in Marshalltown.

“When I see kids coming in here, they are excited about it. They think it is the greatest thing ever,” he says. “I have had some people just bring the kids in to play.”

Park, who is one of the original members of the club, said that over time he has traded and purchased multiple machines through other club members.

But his love affair with the little metal ball began, as it has for many, in childhood.

“Everyone had an Atari 2600 growing up. I never had a gaming system, so I guess this was my gaming system,” he says of the Star Shooter pinball machine he got in 1983. “I remember one time during a sleepover, we couldn't figure out how to turn the volume down, and we wanted to play it at night. We had to put pillows inside it to muffle the sound so we wouldn't wake up my parents.”

Park still has the old Star Shooter game and he makes his games free to play, as a way of opening up pinball to the community.

But opportunities like Park's are few and far between, and a game which used to be stationed in the back corner of every neighborhood bar and restaurant, has almost completely disappeared from public play.

Pinball's demise

“Pinball is always going to break down,” says Richard Conger. “A ball or rubber will get loose. They always need service.”

Conger should know.

The 73-year-old lives in his Sebastopol, Calif. home - The Silverball Ranch - an apt name for a home that holds more than 500 pinball machines.

“Videogames don't break down,” he says.

“In the early '70s you would find a lot of pinball machines in great shape because (a bar) would have a pinball machine and a few videogame machines and the pinball machine got very little use.”

Pinball also has had a strained relationship with the law over the years.

“When it comes to the law, a number of laws and municipalities have looked upon pinball as an out and out form of gambling,” says Jeffrey Lawton, an author of books and articles on bingo pinball from Cincinnati, Ohio.

“Kids could win a lot of games on it and have other people buy the games off of them and that could be considered gambling.”

Conger remembers a time in his childhood in San Jose, Calif., when the city collected a number of bingo pinball machines, drove them to the dump, and ran over them with trucks.

“I went out and got all the balls and locks from the broken machines,” he says with a chuckle.

But for the pinball games that survived, the advent and incresed popularity of videogames combined with the pinball games propensity for breaking down contributed to a decline in popularity over the last few decades.

“Society is so much, I want it now,” he says. “I want my entertainment now. I want to do it myself. I want to do it at home. It is a result of society more than a result of other things.”

The future of the club

What began six months ago as a website for pinball fanatics to buy, trade and seek repair advice has blossomed into a real-world community.

Last March, club member Dana Mitchell hosted a gathering in his game room, and there is a pinball and golf tournament scheduled for Oct. 25 to 28 in Des Moines.

“I would love to see (more gatherings) happening,” Klygo says. “People have game rooms, so just have people over, bring your own dish to pass and play some games. I would love to see a community in pinball. It has been banished to the back corners of arcades for so long, it is now more prevalent in homes than on locations.”

There also are still a few local establishments that have pinball machines. Klygo and others are determined to let people know about them. The club is contributing to a mobile phone application called Pinball Map that will direct people to public places that have pinball machines.

“I think it is great to just bop on there and see GPS wise where you are and where a local pinball machine is,” Klygo says. “There is something kind of neat having it tell you where to go and how to get there. ”

Currently there are 53 locations and 67 machines listed in Iowa. Twenty venues are in Cedar Rapids and Iowa City.

Cedar Falls mother Braunigan doesn't care where she plays - whether she steps up to a machine at a local bar or in someone's home game room.

“I just love it,” she says.

“I love the way it smoothly goes up the ramps. The way you can hit it and I know exactly on the flipper where to hit it. It is an art. It is a skill. It relaxes me like nothing else. It makes me happy like a little girl. It's ridiculous, but its pinball.”